Monday, April 12, 2010

Biblical Mathematics

For a good laugh, look at this website, which claims to find the values of the mathematical constants π = 3.14159... and e = 2.71828 ... hidden in the bible.

Needless to say, such numerology is not considered very highly by most mathematicians. It depends too much on the choice of passage, and the method of calculation. In this page, the author decides that the proper measure is the number of letters times the product of the letters divided by the number of words times the product of the words, but on what basis? And even then, he must remove powers of 10 to get his desired result, and cheat in other ways, such as considering a comma as a letter for one calculation, but not another.

Sad to say, this kind of foolishness is the one area where devout Jews and Muslims find agreement. Numerology has wide currency among many Jewish people, where it is called gematria, and among Muslims such as Louis Farrakhan, who says things like, "What is so deep about this number 19? Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today? That number 19 -- when you have a nine you have a womb that is pregnant. And when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there's something secret that has to be unfolded."

15 comments:

I suppose it's timely that I was just reading up on the "scientific" numerology of Mohamed El Naschie, former editor of Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. He has written a bunch of papers that relate constants of physics to each other with no apparent justification.

And seriously-- what is it about religion that makes people believe this gobbledygook? Is it a kind of "Beautiful Mind" thing, where you just see patterns everywhere and think you're reading God's mind?

These people--hell, some of them are rabbis--waste their brain power on this gobbledygook.

How is this different from the homeless guy who thinks the CIA is beaming messages into his brain? Apart from more frequent bathing.

"Nation of Islam" certainly think they're muslims but so far as I can tell they're about as far from normative islam as mormonism is from the Nicene creed. Of course from a suitably long distance away all religions start to look the same.

Yes, it did. But it turns out that the errors that the authors made were rather subtle, and it took a while for them to be exposed. The work of Brendan McKay has now definitively debunked the claims of Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg.

I used to think that among fundamentalist Christians, this kind of nonsense was confined to the pentecostal/charismatic wing. Then I saw a sermon from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, a leader in the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, in which he went through the spiritual significances of various numbers < 50. He hinted that there was much more to be taught, if only he had the mathematical abilities to explain it all.

The material he presented was nearly identical to what you get from Paula White or the Paul and Jan Crouch/TBN bunch. I thought Baptists usually shy away from this stuff, in favor of straightforward Christian nationalism. Has pentecostal nuttiness crept into the SBC?

Robert Marks is co-author of an infamous ex-colleague of mine, Gary Wise, who is now in jail. His office was next to mine in Austin, Texas, and used to threaten me and others that we were going to be shot.

He was insane.

But the university, for years, didn't care about Wise's threats, neither did the police: he was a good Texas Christian boy, conducting, among other stupidities, Bible Studies.

To make a LONG story short, he flipped out completely and started threatening the dean of engineering too. And then they made sure to fire him. He is now in jail, accused for several murder plots.

There is a greek proverb going like this: "Show me your friend and I'll tell you who you are."